75
Butcher’s Crossing is a gorgeous travelog. It’s also a warning about what happens when people fail to tread lightly in the natural world, both as a consequence of nature and themselves.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
Slashfilm by Chris Evangelista
Butcher's Crossing makes a lot of little, stretching its small budget to the extreme to create a nightmarish saga of violent men who seem convinced of their own superiority over everything, especially the land.
50
There’s some fun to be had in the Brando-like flickers of Cage’s performance, but Polsky’s film is too practical and logic-driven to indulge them.
60
Despite Nicolas Cage’s committed performance as the imposing, hardheaded leader of the expedition, this mournful yarn can’t quite transcend what’s familiar about its study of masculinity and the unforgiving spirit of the natural world.
78
Polsky’s film digs into the rot in his characters’ psyches for a time but gradually climbs back out again, perhaps in an attempt to put their madness in a larger context social context. But mostly the final act of the film comes across like clunky, though well-earned, moralizing.